How Michael B. Jordan Got Ripped and Became Hollywood’s New Leading Man

Michael B. Jordan didn’t start this way. Fans of Friday Night Lights will tell you that, yes, while the 31-year-old actor once played an accomplished and heavily recruited high school quarterback on the cultishly beloved show, he was a shell of his current self—a wisp of a thing.

Now the hulking star is in a whole new league. He aced his pec-rippling villain Killmonger in Black Panther, the highest-grossing movie of 2018 at the domestic box office, and he returns in Creed II (in theaters November 21), the follow-up to his 2015 Rocky sequel in which he plays a boxer and son of Rocky’s foe-turned-friend Apollo Creed. (See the Men's Health December cover story on Creed II's Dolph Lundgren and Florian Munteanu.)

Everything suddenly looks possible in Jordan’s career, thanks to a lot of tireless work (including with the punching bags). Here’s how he got to the top of Hollywood’s new A-list.

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1He had a humble upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, where someone thought he should be a model.

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Jordan, born Michael Bakari Jordan, grew up in Newark with politically conscious parents who operated a small catering business. He’s called it “hood as fuck,” though in a recent Vanity Fair profile, his mom said he was embellishing. “Yes, when we got up in the morning, there was possibly crack vials and condoms on the street,” she said. “The hood was around us and it was the hood, but our experience was different.”

While his parents worked hard to keep him on the straight and narrow, they also helped him establish his budding modeling career when he was a kid. It started in a doctor’s office when a receptionist said the 11-year-old Jordan should try modeling. He shot for Kmart and Toys “R” Us.

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2He quickly made a name in Hollywood but got typecast in ‘stereotypical black’ roles.

HBOHBO

After a significant role in the Keanu Reeves movie Hardball, Jordan landed a part as a young drug hustler in HBO’s acclaimed The Wire in 2002. It was a breakout moment, even if the show wasn’t quite a hit then. Similar roles flooded in, and he soon played a troubled teen in the soap opera All My Children.

That was when he decided to pivot. In a 2015 GQ profile, he called the All My Children part “a fucking stereotypical black role.” He approached his agent about how to navigate his way to other material.

“Instead of taking something conceptually written for a black guy, I want the stuff that was written for a guy,” Jordan told GQ.

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3Friday Night Lights was a dream role.

NBC UniversalNBC

Jordan got his chance to show every dimension of what he can do on a screen with Friday Night Lights, the sports/melodrama series, with a two-season arc starting in 2009 as Vince Howard. He’s again troubled, but also immensely talented and driven, and helps win a championship.

Jordan, who was already in his twenties, showed his (still nascent) muscularity and athleticism, but most importantly, that flawless smile and an irrepressible charm. He was able to move on to similarly gratifying work in the show Parenthood and the films Red Tails and Chronicle. But he hadn’t quite found the movie vehicle that would make him Hollywood’s new golden boy.

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4Fruitvale Station was a sobering indie smash.

It’s impossible to talk about Jordan’s career without also talking about Ryan Coogler, the millennial writer and director behind Creed and Black Panther whose fate is tied with that of the actor. Coogler’s first feature film, 2013’s Fruitvale Station, follows the real-life story of Oscar Grant (Jordan), a 22-year-old black man who was wrongfully killed by police in Oakland, California.

Fruitvale Station, which went on to be an indie hit, immediately showed off Coogler’s nimble talents behind the camera and in telling thoughtfully topical narratives with racial themes. It also became a calling card for Jordan, who went all in preparing for the role, hanging out in Oakland and hanging around with people who knew Grant.

The film’s success also set Jordan down a path of trying to tackle material that he feels will make the black community proud. “Creating our own mythology is very important because… You help people dream,” he told Vanity Fair.

And after Fruitvale Station, Jordan didn’t have any trouble getting calls from casting agents.

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5He had a (failed) superhero career.

20th Century Fox20th Century Fox

A blockbuster was next on Jordan’s to-do list. “You need your franchise because in order for him to achieve all the things that he had the ambition to do, we had to make him a star, a bona-fide star,” his agent told Vanity Fair.

That franchise vehicle could’ve been the 2015 Fantastic Four, in which he plays Johnny Storm, but the bundled production was critically reviled and landed with a thud at the box office.

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6Creed changed everything — including Jordan’s body.

Warner Bros.

Luckily, he already had another fire going before that movie hit theaters. He and Coogler filmed Creed, a new chapter in the Rocky Balboa series that Coogler had been trying to sell Sylvester Stallone on for over a year. Jordan cut himself off from most of his social life, training six days a week to get the chiseled body required to credibly portray a middleweight boxer.

Needless to say, it worked. While Jordan is by no means gigantic in Creed, his ripped body shows off nearly every muscle glistening with sweat. It helped, of course, that he and Stallone as his mentor figure also bring heaps of emotion to the story of Adonis Johnson aka Adonis Creed’s rise and struggle with living in the shadow of his late father.

Adonis’ love interest, played by Tessa Thompson, tells him in one cry-worthy scene, “You are Apollo Creed's son, so use the name. It's yours.”

Creed wasn’t just a bona fide blockbuster; it was an Oscar-nominated critical darling. And Jordan got that franchise.

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7Black Panther has made him a global leading man.

Marvel StudiosMarvel Studios

Sure, Creed came with plenty of eyeballs, cachet, and endorsement deals (including with Nike, Piaget watches, and Acura). But it had not yet made him a global draw.

Then there was Black Panther, the $200 million-budget Marvel movie with a nearly all-black cast that is explicitly about black lives, without much intrusion from white people. Centered on the fictional African country Wakanda, it also follows Jordan’s villain Killmonger, who grows up in the US before attempting to take the leadership of Wakanda from Black Panther.

Black Panther dispelled the still prevalent Hollywood myth that black-centric movies can’t sell overseas. It made $1.3 billion worldwide. Creed II, in which Adonis (again, bigger than before) faces off against Soviet boxer Ivan Drago’s son Viktor Drago, is “more international” because, “If you don’t perform domestically, and you can still make money internationally, you will always be around,” Jordan told Vanity Fair.

The unprecedented success of Black Panther also made Jordan, shirtless for basically the entire film and even more impossibly bulked up since Creed, a subject of memes and heartthrob attention online. His abs were practically their own character.

He got massive after Creed to be supervillain-y, relying on the same trainer he’s used since the 2015 Rocky movie, Corey Calliet. Calliet talked to Men’s Health about the moves Jordan has used to train for his roles, going from the size of Black Panther to his more shredded appearance in Creed II. It involved kettlebell swings, pushups, and of course a whole lot of boxing.

"We always go until we can't go anymore,” Calliet said.

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9But he’s more than a star — he’s an empire-builder.

Barry Wetcher

Jordan, who’s clearly very self-aware about his place in Hollywood and how to mold his career, doesn’t want to put all his chips on acting. He started his own production company to get involved in projects from inception to completion—to really own and steer them. He also launched a marketing startup.

Jordan, who as an actor models himself after Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, has another hero in mind in his business endeavors. He’s looked at the success of Jay-Z and LeBron James, who has his own production and marketing operation worth almost $1 billion, as sources of inspiration.

“Whenever I see [James], it’s love, always trying to represent our generation, represent our culture, like, ‘Why not us?’” Jordan told Vanity Fair. “Things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been done. I just happen to do more than just act.”

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Paul SchrodtPaul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor who also contributes to Esquire, GQ, Money, The Wall Street Journal, and more.

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